Eagle from cadsoft is a design tool for printed circuit boards for which I use to create PCB’s. Eagle is capable of porting these to IDF format to support generating a 3D view of the board. It then generates two files with .emp and .emn extension which is a intermediate file format used to generate a 3D file. the .emn file is the one containing PCB specific data to import as 3D. The EMP is a library file containing components info, position and height infor of these. It is the emn file that is of interest to me
I could not see any support for loading IDF formatted files in Rhino. Question is if there are any plugins that could do or other solutions available.
There is more information available at the following coordinates regarding IDF files.
Hi I asked for this solution a while ago and got no responce, so i dare to ask again. Mostly because I am in process of finally deciding for which 3d system I will go for but also because I just found that solidworks has a solution for this from a third party called “circuitworks”.
After having tested both Rhino and Solidworks, and many other 3D-CAD systems, I found that the most important features i needed, next to being available for Linux platform which unfortunately none is pr. today (but which should be feasible for Rhino), was supported by both. I like Rhino the better, but it would be more easy selling Rhino in to my company (which does a lot of electronics development) if it could import IDF formatted files.
I would therefor highly recommend that importing IDF files, or more correctly generating 3D CAD’s based on IDF script input, becomes a part of Rhino’s toolbox. IDF is not just a firefly but many electronic CAD systems supports it like Eagle and Altium.
